A Cognitive-Semiotic Construal of Metaphor in Discourse

2.1 Cognitive semiotics

Semiotic studies can be dated back to more than two thousand years ago, with the Greek philosophers emphasizing the importance of semiotic in the meaning of mankind. Later the Stoics (Zeno) and other philosophers studied the application of signs in detail. However, only at the end of the 18th century did the word “semiotic” occur, which was put forward by Lambert, a German philosopher. Cognitive semiotics occurs firstly in Sonesson’s Pictorial concepts (1989), where he states: “I have been involved with phenomenological cognitive semiotics from the very start of my career without knowing it – or rather, without using the term” (Sonesson 2009: 26). In the mid-1990s, Daddesio put forward that the aims of cognitive semiotics was to “demonstrate both the feasibility and utility of a cognitive approach to semiosis by setting forth a cognitive theory of symbols, which I will then apply to a particularly difficult area of inquiry, the development of symbolic communication in children” (Daddesio 1995: 2). He also presents how continual effort to “de-mentalize” concepts such as symbols, signs, and semiosis divided semiotics and cognitive science in On minds and symbols: The relevance of cognitive science for semiotics. In recent years, systematic thought on signs has attracted a number of researchers’ attention, and cognitive semiotics has become a hot topic in cognitive linguistics (Lakoff 1993; Langacker 2002) and cognitive psychology (Tomasello 2009).

The Center for Semiotics in Arhus, Denmark, ^[1] depicts cognitive semiotics as “a new discipline dedicated to the analysis of meaning.” Language is studied as a dynamic action, where symbolic modes are linked and related to facilitate and constrain social coordination (e.g. Tylén et al. 2010; Fusaroli and Tylén 2012). Lund University set up another Centre for Cognitive Semiotics to gather scholars from linguistics, semiotics, cognitive science, and related disciplines on a metatheoretical platform of notions, frames, and shared empirical data on the website ^[2]. Therefore, cognitive semiotics is not based only on a meta-analysis of the results of the cognitive sciences; it should go along with semiotics, linguistics, and different disciplines to inspire specific empirical studies.

In 2007, Copenhagen Business School established an interdisciplinary team, under the leadership of Per Durst-Andersen, who suggested that the grammatical meanings of any specific language tended to focus on one of the three semiotic aspects: Reality, Speaker and Hearer, therefore, all languages could be featured as one of three “linguistic supertypes.” The study of Viktor Smith, a third outstanding member of the team, was more “bottom-up,” with researches on semantic and pragmatic compound expressions, explained under various contextual environments and experimental settings.

In recent years, scholars began to turn to “conceptual” and “experiential” models such as schema, metaphor, metonymy, and attention. The basis was thus on a reconciliation, comprising concepts from semiotics, linguistics, neuroscience, and psychology, therefore, showing that cognitive semiotics is ongoing practice and not only a theoretic design. One of the outstanding achievements for cognitive semiotics of the collaboration was the appearance of the journal Cognitive Semiotics in 2007. So far, the volumes published have been focused on topics like agency, cognitive poetics, and consciousness, and have presented famous authors from either the humanities or cognitive science. Therefore, cognitive semiotics has been “overall semiotics,” which is proposed to pay close attention to individual issues in the process of constructing semiotic models (Yu 2019: 144). In Section 4, we will present our cognitive-semiotic network model for construal of conceptual metaphors in Dragon Seed.

2.2 Conceptual metaphor

As a cognitive phenomenon, metaphor has been a hot issue in different disciplines, such as philosophy, linguistics, literature, and sociology. The following recapitulation of studies on it is conducted mainly from cognitive perspectives. According to Lakoff and Johnson (1980), conceptual metaphor is a cognitive phenomenon used automatically, commonly, and unconsciously by human beings in everyday life (1980: 25). It involves a series of conceptual correspondences called “mappings” from a source domain to a target domain. The two domains of experience are represented in the mind as concepts stored as mental spaces or cognitive frames. The mapping of corresponding concepts between two different domains is called conceptual metaphor (Lakoff 1993).

Lakoff and Johnson further identify three categories of conceptual metaphors overlapping one another. The first category is structural metaphor, cases where one concept is metaphorically structured in terms of another (1980: 14). Take the sentence Let’s pool our thoughts as an example. The implied metaphor of this is THOUGHTS ARE RESOURCES. The target domain THOUGHTS shares a resemblance with the source domain RESOURCES, which is based on systematic correlations within human beings’ experience (1980: 61).

The second category is orientational metaphor, where one concept organizes a whole system of concepts with respect to one another, which involves spatial relations of things such as in–out, front–back, up–down, etc. (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 14). Most human beings’ fundamental concepts are kept in terms of one or more spatialization metaphors and there is an internal systematicity to each spatialization metaphor. For example, in the mapping RATIONAL IS UP; EMOTIONAL IS DOWN, we can see orientational metaphors have close relations with our cognitive and social experience. According to our cognition, we usually regard ourselves as superior to animals, and it is only human beings that can be above other animals and control them. Thus, the metaphor CONTROL IS UP is the foundation for construing the meaning of MAN IS UP and therefore for RATIONAL IS UP. Although the opposite directional pair of words like in–out, up–down, etc., are physical in nature, the orientational metaphors based on them vary from culture to culture. For example, in some cultures, the future is viewed as being in front of us, but in others, it is behind us (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 14).

The third category is ontological metaphor, in which something concrete is mapped onto something abstract. Our experience with our bodies provides the basis for a variety of ontological metaphors, that is, means of viewing events, ideas, activities, etc. as entities and substances, and there are three subcategories of this: entity and substance metaphor, container metaphor, and personification (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 26). Lakoff and Johnson take THE MIND IS A MACHINE as an example to interpret how ontological metaphor is interpreted in a cultural context.

(1) We're still trying to grind out the solution to this equation. My mind just isn't operating today. (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 27)

In example (1), “my mind” is conceptualized as “a machine” and the mapping is from the source domain “machine” to the target domain “mind.” The sentence means ‘I cannot find a good way to solve the equation, for my mind is just like a broken machine which cannot operate today.’

In Lakoff and Johnson’s view, we share a lot of conceptual similarities with a container, for we have a bounding surface and an in–out orientation (1980: 26). Our visual field is also conceptualized as a container. When we look at a certain territory such as space, land, etc., our field of vision is a boundary of the territory that we can see, because the metaphorical concept VISUAL FIELDS ARE CONTAINERS appears naturally. Here are some examples.

The ship is coming into view.

I have him in sight.

I can't see him—the tree is in the way.

He's out of sight now.

That's in the center of my field of vision.

There's nothing in sight.

I can't get all of the ships in sight at once.

Lakoff and Johnson (1980: 30)

In addition to the above single model of conceptual metaphors, there exist a large number of complex models in which some concepts overlap. Taking SEEING IS BELIEVING as an example, in a topic “We can see this only if we delve deeply into the issues,” the superficial meanings are salient and they are easy to believe and see, but the deep meanings are not obvious, which requires the decoders’ effort to reveal them. By investigating more deeply into the topic, decoders can see more and thus believe more. This interprets expressions like “Dig further into this topic and you will discover a great deal (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 104). Therefore, the same kind of coherence that occurs in simple models also appears in more complex ones. What may firstly appear to be randomly metaphorical expressions ultimately prove to be deliberate. In fact, they are part of integrative metaphorical systems that serve the complex purpose of characterizing the concept of a topic in all of its aspects.

Recently, conceptual metaphors have been studied in the cognitive semiotics field, which have proved to be an effective means in the framing of human beings’ cognitive and cultural experiences, as well as their ideology. Therefore, this has attracted many scholars’ attention, leading to more research into this area being conducted (Hutchins 2001; Gibbs 2014; Zhao 2019) and proving to be a very useful approach to discourse analysis.

2.3 Conceptual blending

Conceptual blending has been assumed to be a common principle underlying the construction of meaning in a series of mental phenomena of varying complexity. In most situations, the conceptual blending relies on the construction of a mapping between counterparts in various spaces. On the one hand, these spaces can be set up from various conceptual domains or from the same domain. On the other hand, the mappings between the spaces can be categorical, metaphorical, and logical. It is assumed there is a source space as a generic predicate to the target space that the metaphor refers to. Blending Theory (BT) aspires to be a universal methodological framework for analyzing different types of semiotic data. Besides the study of language, the theory is used to interpret visual symbols, signs, cartoons, elements of computer interface, religious and cultural phenomena, and many other areas.

BT is seen as a methodological framework for diverse cognitive phenomena with the potential of contributing to our theoretical construal of a discourse. It is also called Conceptual Blending Theory (CBT) or Conceptual Integration Theory (CITO). Originally, the framework was adopted mainly for interpreting linguistic phenomena, especially metaphorical expressions in discourse. Nowadays, BT is seen as an important cognitive theory to explain processes embedded in a human’s mind and appearing in a great number of human activities. Two important sources of theories have contributed to BT. One is Mental Spaces Theory (MST), proposed by Fauconnier and Turner (1998), and the other is Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT).

The two theories are very popular and highly influential, but BT is characterized by its complicated theories and broad scope of practical application. Mental space is defined as “a partial and temporary representational structure which speakers construct when thinking or talking about a perceived, imagined, past, present, or future situation” (Grady et al. 1999: 102). In BT, elements from different mental spaces are in consistence with one another and selectively projected onto a blended space, yielding emergent meaning (Fauconnier and Turner 1998). Each mental space includes a set of interrelated elements that can be activated as a unit. These mental spaces consist of a generic space, two or more input spaces, and a blended space. Elements in the generic space each map onto an element in each of the input spaces and represent what the input spaces have in common. Moreover, the selective mapping between elements across input spaces occurs, along with a selective projection of elements from input spaces to the blended space. By establishing relationships between elements in different spaces, these processes create emergent meaning. From the above recapitulation, we can see that CMT and BT hold that metaphors are embedded in the human conceptual system, and they have inspired a great number of studies on metaphor (Fauconnier and Turner 2002). However, both CMT and BT followers pay little attention to the context while conducting their research on metaphor. Even those who are engaged in studying the meaning-making of metaphors still fail to involve contexts in their model of metaphor study. Therefore, we advocate a cognitive-semiotic approach to them, which not only gives a clear explanation of the various contextual factors that are involved in shaping the human conceptual system but also discusses in detail how these contextual factors work together in the conceptualization of metaphorical utterances via a corpus approach.

3.1 Data analysis

At the beginning of the study, the text version of Dragon Seed was put into AntConc 3.2.4w to set up a corpus, the tokens and types of which are 138731 and 5097, respectively. The tokens can be regarded as words in our daily expression and the types refer to unrepeated tokens. However, the number of tokens and types alone cannot account for the characteristics of discourse, so TTR(type-token ratio) is calculated and the STTR (standardized type-token ratio) is subsequently obtained after averaging TTR per 1000 words. By calculating and averaging the TTR of every 1,000 words of the novel, the variability of the word is reflected (Yang 2002). The description of the corpus in Dragon Seed is shown in detail in Table 1.

Table 1 shows the description of the corpus in Dragon Seed. First, from the data, it can be found that the TTR is 3.6 and STTR is 35.6, which reveals that the variability of the vocabulary is at a medium level. Second, as is shown in the table, the STTR of each chapter varies from 23.9 to 33.4. Chapters like 1, 2, 16, 17, 19, and 20 have comparatively higher STTR than the other chapters and the variability of STTR of these chapters is consistent with the plot development of the novel. To illustrate this in detail, the first two chapters are the beginning of the whole novel, in which the leading characters such as Tan Lin and Sao Lin and their children are introduced, and the background of Dragon Seed is made clear in the first two chapters. In chapters 16 and 17, Mayli and puppet appear and the puppet is the target domain. The last chapter is the end part of the novel, it follows the dramatic plot development in previous chapters and points out although the destiny of the characters in this novel is remarkably changed by the war, the future is bright for them.

3.2 Metaphor identification

In line with the three-stage metaphor analysis methodology put forward by Charteris-Black, the first stage is to identify the metaphors in the novel. To achieve this, we did a close reading of the text intending to identify candidate metaphors, which were then examined under the guidance of CMT, holding that the entities, relations, characteristics, and knowledge in the source domain are mapped correspondingly onto the target domain. Additionally, the mapping of metaphors is not arbitrary, and the characteristics mapped onto the target domain from the source domain conform to the structure of the target domain. Finally, the keywords that did not satisfy these criteria were excluded, while those with a metaphoric sense were then classified as metaphorical keywords and it was possible to measure the occurrences of keywords quantitatively in the corpus. Nevertheless, to ascertain whether the occurrence containing keywords was metaphoric, a further qualitative phase was required to determine whether each use of a keyword was metaphoric or literal.

To illustrate the identification procedure more specifically, examples are taken from the novel. Moreover, the identification procedure assumes that similes are also metaphors, because, as Aristotle said, “the simile is a metaphor; the difference is but slight” (2005). Goatly (1997) also notes that metaphors are signals which include such words as “like” and “as,” and they are used to denote that similes are indicators of potential metaphors. Take the following two sentences from the novel as examples.

(2) I come home my belly roaring like a hungry lion. (Buck 1941: 21)

(3) […] his flesh so fallen away that with the fat gone, he looked as though his skin were a garment for him. (p. 55)

In example (2), the source domain is LION and the target domain is BELLY and the mapping between the two domains is not arbitrary for the reason that the two domains share the same characteristic that when people are very hungry, their belly will growl just like the sound produced by a lion. In example 3, the source domain is GARMENT and the target domain is SKIN. The skin and the garment seem to have nothing in common without knowing the context. Nevertheless, example 3 in the novel means that Wu Lien was hurt physically and spiritually after his shop was destroyed by the Japanese and the obvious evidence of such hurt was the sudden loss of his weight, which made his skin look like an unbecoming garment on his originally fatty body. Taking a look at the two examples together, it is not difficult to figure out that both of them have two domains, and with the construal of context there is a certain mapping between the two domains. Therefore, the basic criterion for metaphor identification is that there should be two domains and a reasonable mapping between the two domains. Furthermore, the two keywords “lion” and “garment” were searched in the corpus with the aid of the corpus tool AntConc 3.2.4w, which was facilitative in retrieving and calculating the keywords. The result is that the total occurrence of “lion” and “garment” is 2 and 7 respectively, of which the occurrence with a metaphoric sense is only 1 and 1 respectively. Table 2 shows the seven categories (the seventh category, “others,” includes those expressions that appear in a relatively low frequency) of metaphorical expressions identified and the metaphorical keywords of each category.

On the basis of Table 2, the top occurrence of each category with a metaphoric sense is shown in Table 3. According to Table 3, the top occurrences of expressions with metaphorical keywords of each category in total are 431, in which the occurrence of the metaphorical expression is 98 and the percentage of metaphorization is 22.7%. In other words, nearly one in five expressions containing the keyword has a metaphorical sense.

To obtain a clearer view of the distribution of different categories of metaphors in the novel, the top occurrence of each category of metaphor and its percentage in the total number of metaphors is presented in Table 4 and the distribution of seven categories of metaphors in each chapter is shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2

Distribution of seven categories of metaphors in each chapter (x=chapter; y= number of metaphorical words)

It can be seen from Table 4 that the human metaphor appears most frequently, at 29.6% of the total number, followed by the container metaphor, occupying 28.6%, and then the animal metaphor, plant metaphor, and nature metaphor successively, at 15.3%, 14.3%, 8.2% respectively. Finally, building metaphors and other metaphors account for 2.0% each.

As is shown in Figure 2, the distribution of metaphors in Chapters 1, 4, 5, 10, and 12 are relatively higher than in other chapters. Among them, Chapter 10 holds the first place in metaphorical expressions, while the least is Chapter 19. Chapter 10 is in the middle of the total 20 chapters, and it is also the climax of the novel, reflected in three aspects. First, there is the physical and mental trauma of war on people. The originally large Ling Tan family is reduced to only two persons, the Ling Tan couple, because some of the family members leave home and some die. In Chapter 10, the eldest son leaves home as a result of the loss of his two children. Second, there is the Chinese farmers’ strong will to hold the land. Since there is only the Ling Tan couple left at home, it is urgent for them to have more people to secure their land. As Ling Tan says: “I will hold this land as long as I live” (p. 312), so they write to ask Lao Er and Jade to come back. Last, there is the unique wisdom of the Chinese farmers. To protect Jade and their little grandson as possibly as they can, the Ling Tan couple start to dig a hole under the ground of the kitchen before Lao Er’s family get home. Moreover, owing to experiences in the free land, Lao Er knows that even farmers can fight against invaders in their own way and realizes the importance of fighting cooperatively with guns.

3.3 Analysis of seven categories of conceptual metaphors

As it is presented in Table 3, seven categories of metaphors occur in the novel, and they are both context-dependent and culture-dependent on the social situation of China during the periods of 1930s and 1940s. These conceptual metaphors show the unique writing style of the author, and they are analyzed according to the sequence listed in Table 4 as follows.

3.4 Construal of the author’s ideology

Metaphor is not only a lexical phenomenon but one which is highly dependent upon context and discourse context (Ortony 1978). Japan’s invasion of China in the early 1930s and the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) brought a catastrophic disaster to the Chinese people, causing up to 20 million casualties. Dragon Seed is set in the period from the 1930s to the 1940s, when China was trapped in the War of Resistance against Japan. The Chinese people lived in an abyss of misery as a consequence of the war. Nevertheless, with the progress of the war, farmers like Tan Lin began to participate in the war and defended their own homes with wisdom, which revealed the awakening of Chinese people. To improve the situation, both farmers and intellectuals should make a joint effort to fight against foreign aggression. The metaphorical expressions used by Pearl S. Buck in the novel depict vividly the story of Chinese farmers’ resistance against Japanese invaders, conforming to the patriotic ideology at that time in China.

The cognitive context, a constructive net of cognition formed by schematization of certain concepts based on people’s own experiences, is the product of the cognitive generalization of linguistic context, situational context, and cultural context (Zhao 2008: 24). In the literature field, writers’ creative ideas in their works are influenced by their cognitive environment. According to Sperber and Wilson (1995: 39), an individual’s total cognitive environment is a function of his physical environment and his cognitive abilities. Therefore, different writers show their personal characteristics in their works because they own different cognitive abilities, knowledge, and cultural contexts. Pearl S. Buck once lived in China for 40 years and was well acquainted with Chinese people, so part of her knowledge background and cultural background are different from other American writers, and this difference formed her extraordinary cognitive context with Chinese characteristics. There is little wonder that she used native metaphorical expressions according to the Chinese people’s customs when depicting Chinese farmers’ life. As Zhao states it, “Pearl Buck’s metaphorical thinking in the novel is in a unique Chinese-context mode” (Zhao et al. 2019: 108).

A discourse cannot be fully appreciated by a decoder without consideration of its context, which means that a decoder cannot construe a discourse with ignorance of its context. As to the classification of context, different scholars classify it in different ways, so there are various terms for contexts, such as cultural context, psychological context, social context, and speech context. However, the function of context in metaphor construal is self-evident (Wei 2016). Halliday states that language should be interpreted “within a sociocultural context” (Halliday 1978: 2). The same discourse in different contexts may deliver different messages, and all of this is dependent on the readers’ own choice. The construal of discourse is the result of context-based construal rather than the mere decoding of linguistic forms (Zhao 2015). All in all, social context plays a crucial role in metaphor construal in discourse analysis. In Dragon Seed, elements of Chinese culture, Chinese farmers, and the Chinese War of Resistance against Japan should be involved in the social context, without which the metaphorical expressions in the novel will be difficult to understand.